The Wonderful Tale of Henry Kissinger & Three More

"The death of satire!" said a thousand Twitter wits when Tony Blair was announced as the winner of the GQ Philanthropist of the Year award. But as terrible decisions for prizes go, it's not even close to the top.

Fun fact: Richard Nixon (left) and Henry Kissinger also served in a barber shop quartet together

1. Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize, 1973.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a funny one. Barack Obama got one for being elected, and thus for averting the inevitable military coup to prevent Sarah Palin ever becoming vice-president. (I think that was why. I forget.) Since then, there are many words one can use to describe Obama-era foreign policy – "taupe", "drone" and "ineffective" all come to mind – but "peace" sure ain't one of them. That pales in comparison, however, to the 1973 award, which went to Henry Kissinger, the then-Secretary of State for the United States. An early sign that the award was horrendously ill-considered came when Lê Đức Thọ, the Vietnamese diplomat who he was supposed to share the award with, refused it, saying that "peace" in Vietnam remained a distant prospect. Conflict in Vietnam continued until the fall of Saigon a full two years after Kissinger was given the award. As an added mark against the prize, it was enough to bring the career of Tom Lehrer, the American satirist, to an abrupt end. "I can't compete with that," he said.

Martin Amis. Novelist and private detective

2. Man Booker Prize, 1991.

This is to take absolutely nothing away from Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which, if you like faintly mystical novels about African politics, was pretty good. The problem with The Famished Road was that it wasn’t Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis's marvellous novel about the Holocaust (no, wait a moment). The protagonist, Tod Friendly, ages backwards, so he is "born" at the start of the novel an elderly reclusive doctor in America, becomes younger, before eventually ending up back as a scientist in the concentration camps; reimagined, thanks to Amis' narrative conceit, as a place of birth (unlike the hospitals and doctors he visits throughout the novel, where he returns sicker than he had been before). At the time, of course, it was no big deal that he'd missed out. Amis' 1973-1991 phase had a larval quality to it, with each novel somehow surpassing the one before it. Coming of the back of his Other People, Money, London Fields trilogy it felt as if Amis was about to embark on a great novel. Instead he wrote The Information, and it now seems likely that one of the great novelists of the latter period of the 20th century will go without literature's biggest prize.

There's no excuse. None

3. 1995. Forrest Gump beats Pulp Fiction to the Best Picture Award.

If life is a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump is carob, the healthier, nastier quasi-chocolate snack for middle-class parents who hate their children. It's trite. It's overlong. It's mawkish. And, one feels, it only did so well because it was Tom Hanks' "turn". It is one of those supposed inspirational films which, bluntly, has no place in a civilised society. It's also not Pulp Fiction, which, inexplicably, was overlooked in favour of the ghastly Gump.

There are many, many objections to BBC Radio 1xtra’s Power List of Black and Urban Music, some reasonable, some less so. But if we are to have such things, I feel certain that they should only include people who are demonstrably either black or urban, or indeed both. Race, is of course, partially a matter of self-identification, so I suppose it is halfway plausible that Ed Sheeran is black. Even allowing for a bonfire of planning regulations, I find it unlikely that Framlingham, Suffolk, were Mr Sheeran grew up, will be “urban” any time soon.

Maybe Tony Blair – founder of three charities since 2007 – isn't such a bad shout by GQ after all.